[ { "id": 204290, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1961", "page_number": 58, "title": "RAS-1961", "content_text": "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch \n\nRASHKB and author \n\nVol. 1 (1961) \n\nISSN 1991-7295 \n\n54 \n\nas a free gift to form a reference library. The books had suffered a good deal in being constantly moved about, the number was now 3800, all of them dilapidated and 3000 were considered worth rebinding. This would cost about $3,000 but the Society had no money for this work. A despatch dated 29 December, 1863 from the acting Governor, W. T. Mercer to the Colonial Secretary quoted the Morrison Education Society's circular and asked for action.1 \n\nA City Hall containing a Library and a Museum was eventually built on the site now occupied by the Bank of China and the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation in Queen's Road Central and adjoining Statue Square. It was opened by the Duke of Edinburgh on the 2 November, 1869 and during his tour of the building His Grace visited both the Library and the Museum. \n\nA printed catalogue of the Morrison Library was issued in 1873 by the City Hall Committee. It contains 1666 entries arranged in alphabetical order of authors or titles, editor, translator, etc., where the author is not known, only eight of which I have been able to identify as belonging formerly to the Royal Asiatic Society. The books are classified, single letters indicating the following groups :- \n\nA History. Peerages, &c. B Biographies and memoirs. C Geography including works on various countries. Travels, Voyages and Adventures, \n\nD Natural History: Ornithology. E Botany. \n\nF Atlas Gazetteers, Meteorology, Guidebooks, Geology, Metallurgy and Mineralogy. Topography. \n\nG Mechanics. \n\nH Encyclopaedias, \n\nI Commercial Statistics. International Law, Jurisprudence, \n\nJ Complete Works. K Astronomy. \n\nL Chemistry. Optics. \n\nM Mathematics. \n\nN Painting, Music. Science and Art, \n\nO Medicine and Surgery. \n\nP Biblical works. \n\nQ Oriental Societies. Journals. R Classics. Dictionaries. \n\nS Novels. \n\nT Drama and poetry. \n\nU Periodical works. Directories. V Divinity. Law, Treaties and Conventions. W Miscellaneous works. \n\nA stocktaking was made in 1956 and of the 1666 titles there are now 1233 remaining (2748 volumes out of 3583). Some volumes were removed during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong and were not subsequently recovered. The condition of the books is poor. Nearly all are worm-eaten to a greater or \n\n1 C.O.129/94, Public Records Office, London. (I am indebted to Mr. G. B. Endacott of the University of Hong Kong for supplying this reference).", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1961.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/vd6724704", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205854, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1969", "page_number": 160, "title": "RAS-1969", "content_text": "154\n\nNOTES AND QUERIES\n\nEARLY HONG KONG LIBRARIES\n\nVol. VIII of the Society's Journal contained an introduction to Hong Kong's library history under the heading of \"Notes on Hong Kong Libraries in the Nineteenth Century\". It mentioned as foremost of the early libraries in the Colony the Victoria Library and Reading Rooms which had been privately organised in 1848. There was, however, a still earlier library—that of the Asiatic Society of China which was founded in January 1847 and later became the China Branch and, still later, the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. Some of the founders of the Society had belonged to a Medico-Chirurgical Society founded in Hong Kong in May 1845 and to a Philosophical Society of Hong Kong formed shortly before the Asiatic Society. Both these societies were merged in the Asiatic Society in January 1847, and the books of the Medico-Chirurgical Society were handed over to the Asiatic Society to form part of the new Society's library on the understanding that members of the Medico-Chirurgical Society be admitted as members of the Asiatic Society without ballot or entrance fee.\n\nThe Asiatic Society's library was kept from 1849 in a room at the Court House which had been granted for the use of the Society for its meetings by Sir George Bonham. When the Society ran into difficulties in 1858 it handed over its valuable library of 400 books on trust to the Morrison Education Society which had been formed in Canton in 1835 and which, from 1855, had also kept its library in the Old Court House.\n\nWhen the demand for a proper public library grew on the building of the City Hall the Morrison Education Society presented its own library and that of the Royal Asiatic Society to the City Hall Library which was visited by the Duke of Edinburgh when he opened the City Hall on 2 November, 1869,\n\nHong Kong, 1969.\n\nJ. R. JONES\n\nDEFENCE WALL AT PASS BETWEEN KOWLOON CITY AND KOWLOON TSAI\n\nThis item on one of the antiquities of Old Kowloon City is taken from a pencilled note in one of Mr. Walter Schofield's note-books, dated 15th April, 1928. It is clearly a contemporary description. The note is reproduced", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209592, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1982", "page_number": 249, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "227\n\nwas commendable that the A.D.C. had departed from farce and burlesque, its venture into something more serious was not altogether successful; but the fault may have been not in the type of drama but in the type of characters of the particular play. It was the opinion of the reviewer that \"In selecting plays they should have no out-of-the-way characters. A success at home may not be suited to Amateurs, such as these in Hong Kong. Some dramas are written for special actors\". He suggested that \"perhaps the amateurs could give a selection, perhaps one or two scenes, or an act from a standard play, for example, the scene between Wolsey and Cromwell in Henry VIII.\" This had been done by the Hon. Mr. York at the inauguration of the City Hall's Theatre Royal in 1869 during the visit of His Royal Highness, the Duke of Edinburgh.\n\nThe suggestion was not taken up, and the Company attempted another serious piece, the popular play \"The Caste\". In this, the amateurs had to compete against the standard set by performances given a short time before by two different travelling professional companies in which actresses played the female parts. The comparison was not kind to the amateurs. As usual, the reviewer was reluctant to criticize, but he did venture to say that the performance might tend to lessen subscriptions for the next season. He thought too much had been spent on the costumes, when, in fact, in his view, \"people go to see acting, not wardrobe\".\n\nThe A.D.C. returned to something lighter, and in 1876 put on a very successful burlesque, \"The Field of the Cloth of Gold,\" by William Brough. The opening scene in the London production had been the harbour of Calais; in Hong Kong, it was the Praya between City Hall and the Bath House of the Victoria Recreation Club. The field of the cloth of gold was East Point. Though it was agreed that there was not much scope for dramatic talent in the piece, it was pronounced \"an undoubted success, and far surpasses, in splendour of the get-up, number of performers, and brilliancy of the scenes, anything hitherto placed on the boards of this colony\". Unfortunately, its lavishness had to be paid for, and it took several seasons before the A.D.C. had a balance.\n\nOne of the perennial favourites was the burlesque \"Aladdin the Wonderful Scamp\". It was given in 1863, 1867, 1875", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209964, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1983", "page_number": 223, "title": "RAS-1983", "content_text": "201\n\nThere were two museums which I intended to visit but as my daughter's birth day approached the time available for such luxuries declined.\n\nI wrote to the Duke of Edinburgh's Royal Regiment museum, at Lichfield, Staffordshire, and received a very helpful reply. The 98th Regiment, later the 2nd North Staffords, served in the First China War and in Hong Kong.\n\nOn display at the museum are a \"soldier's watercolour\" in the uniform of the period c1840-50. \"This also shows a sentry box and the Colours and seems intended to indicate a coastal location. The 'China Dragon' is on the colour and the painting could well relate to the Regiment's subsequent service in Hong Kong (1842-45)\".\n\nThere is an officers' Shako plate (1829-44), an officers' shoulder belt plate, an officers' sword belt clasp (1826-55) and \"two buttons, a shoulder numeral and a few other relics of the period, subsequently dug up in Hong Kong\".\n\nThe other museum which I missed was that of the Royal Berkshire Museum, successors to the 49th Regiment, in Salisbury, Wiltshire.\n\nMy experience in 1983 proved that visitors to England should make a point of calling in at virtually any regimental or army museum that they pass. What may be judged an unimportant relic against the span of centuries of regimental history may be viewed quite differently from a Hong Kong point of view.\n\nNot army, but equally interesting, is the National Railway Museum, in York, which might seem an unlikely place to search for souvenirs of China--but it houses what is probably the biggest one in Britain. There, sparkling and gleaming, is a mighty Chinese National Railways Class KF 4-8-4 locomotive. The 93-foot long behemoth was built in the mid-1930s at the Vulcan Foundry, Newton-le-Willows, to haul 600-ton trains over the mountainous central section of the Canton-Hankow Railway. After 43 years in service the locomotive was presented to the museum by China and it left Shanghai for England in 1981. The sheer size of this monster makes it stand out and it looked to me far and away the biggest in the extensive collection. The engine weighs in at 114.9 tons with a 77-ton tender.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1983.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 211196, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1987", "page_number": 257, "title": "RAS-1987", "content_text": "232\n\nnature and not well suited to act as an aggressive leader. He seldom expressed an opinion at Legislative Council meetings.\n\nHe had spent most of his life in Hongkong. For a few years in the 1840s he had studied as a youth in the United States and had returned there in the middle 1870s as a supervisor of the Chinese Educational Mission. He had been a student of the Morrison Education Society when it moved from Macau to Hongkong in 1842. Through the years he had identified himself with the future of Hongkong.\n\nHe reminded his audience: \"The Chinese were for the present subjects, and he trusted loyal subjects, of Her Majesty, and he thought they also (as well as the Europeans) should take part in the celebration of the jubilee.\"\n\nMr. Ho A-mei then arose and endorsed the chairman's remarks concerning the appropriateness of a Chinese expression of loyalty. He reminded the meeting that in 1869 on the occasion of the visit of the Duke of Edinburgh, the Chinese had taken a prominent part in the celebrations. It was no more fitting now that, “as traders and merchants in the Colony, they ought to take some steps to show their gratitude for the protection afforded them.\"\n\nThe Chinese, he said, while residing in the Colony, were treated as British subjects, and “it behoved them to give some evidence of their loyalty and gratitude.” Especially, as \"in no other country in the world were aliens so well treated as they were on British soil.”\n\nIn the flow of good feeling, he seems to have forgotten the criticisms he had brought against British rule in his struggle to have the Light and Pass Ordinance rescinded.\n\nThe long-standing problem of dual identity was expressed in Ho A-mei's statement that \"they were treated as British subjects here in Hongkong, and although in reality they were not, they might consider themselves as such.\" Pride in the Chinese heritage pulled in one direction, identification with the community in which they lived pulled in another.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1987.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/rx919b522", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 213549, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1995", "page_number": 145, "title": "RAS-1995", "content_text": "114\n\nof it are hard to come by One of the best-known sources in English, whose descriptions I shall speak of later, is Charles G. Leland. In his book, \"Pidgin-English Sing-song\" published in 1876, Leland polishes off his introduction to the language with the words:\n\n\"There are, in all, not more than thirty altogether foreign or strange words in ordinary use, and a number of these are familiar to all persons of the least general information. What remains can present no difficulty to anyone who can understand negro minstrelsy or baby talk\"\n\nTo the modern person who has not lived in the Pacific Islands or Papua New Guinea, Pidgin English brings to mind partly apochryphal stories of Duke-of-Edinburgh worship and terms like \"mixmaster-bilong-Jesus\" (a helicopter) and \"big-man-box-you-bash-him-teeth-he-cry\" (a grand piano).\n\nWe have set the background to the article. Before we go further, let's just remind ourselves what China Coast Pidgin English spoken in the later part of the last century really did sound like. Listen carefully for the baby talk.\n\n\"O-lo dim Hongkong sai hab dou-mat-ji man tok-gi Ying-li-sı a-la sim mai. Je-sı naau no hap gat; a-la daat man go dai. Je-si naau mai ding-ki you no gen hi-ya wan pr-si Chee-na man tok-gi long daat o-lo dim man sim, fa-san.\n\n++\n\nHistorical background\n\nMacau was occupied by the Portuguese in 1557. They had previously been trading with south China for many years from a place called, in Portuguese, Lampacau\n\nDr Graciete Batalha, who has carried out extensive research on the Portuguese dialect of Macao (Glossario do Dialecto Macaense, Instituto Cultural de Macau. 1988 from original articles published from 1971-1977), has formed the opinion that during this early period of the development of the Macau \"patoa”, the formative influence was not so much the way that Chinese people learned to speak Portuguese, but the manner in which the Macau Portuguese formed the habit of speaking to the Chinese in the Portuguese language.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1995.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/95941j25g", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 214207, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1998", "page_number": 65, "title": "RAS-1998", "content_text": "28\n\nso different Chinese ethnic sub-groups laugh at each other. In the early 1950s, when many Shanghainese came to Hong Kong from the Mainland, the sally going the rounds among the Cantonese was: First the Shanghainese travelled in a small car. Now they ride in a big car. For the Westerner who is slow on the uptake this means, when they first came to Hong Kong they drove a car. Later, they could not afford it so they travelled by bus.\n\nIn China too, at one stage there was a tendency, as in other societies years ago, to deride cripples and the mentally retarded (Sypher, 1956; 202). In England in the Middle Ages, a hunchback was expected to caper around and amuse others. Jews, the village idiot, and the 'Chinaman' with his pigtail were usually all good, certainly in the 19th century, for a giggle (Pan, 1990; 84). More recently, there was the case of the Duke of Edinburgh meeting some British students studying in China and the Duke saying to them: 'If you stay here too long you'll get \"slitty\" eyes.' Many people seemed to think it was an insensitive remark and in bad taste. A few however felt, no doubt like the Duke himself (and indeed a few Hong Kong Chinese), that it was all intended in good, clean fun.\n\nWe must not forget that a witch was burned alive in Sunderland, England, as late as 1722, which was an occasion of some merriment. Even today many children enjoy 'cruelty' in their humour, such as the slip on the banana skin or the bucket of water tipped on the head. The author recalls how a colleague, a Chinese teacher, was given the nickname of tsoh hau ue (left [sloping] mouth fish) (false halibut) in the 1950s. Although humour can conceal or even help to heal pain, there are people of all nationalities who delight in the misfortune of others, and, even today, a few get pleasure from stoning a hedgehog to death which is stuck in a hedge.\n\nFrequently one hears about oppressive authority in Chinese life and there are sometimes attempts to 'skewer' an incident, by the oppressed, with a good joke. Everyone loves to make the leaders look stupid.\n\nThere is the one about the three Chinese in a prison cell during the Cultural Revolution. The first said: 'I'm here because I supported Deng", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1998.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/1g05n0794", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 216129, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-2002", "page_number": 428, "title": "RAS-2002", "content_text": "362\n\nMay 1859 after the departure of Sir John Bowring, but was revived with the approval of the parent Society in London and reconstituted as the Hong Kong Branch in December 1959 under the active patronage of the Governor, Sir Robert Black. It is currently very active and is in a sound financial position.\n\nThe Library\n\nSimilar to other branches, the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society set up a collection of books within its field of interest, relating to Asia and its culture. As a result of the merger with the Medico-Chirurgical Society, it had the benefit of inheriting all the books from this Society.\n\nThe Society in Hong Kong was not as fortunate as its Shanghai counterpart where the Government, in 1868, provided a site for its building at a nominal rent and later granted it in perpetuity to the Society.2 For many years, the Hong Kong Branch did not have any permanent site, and thus its collection moved from place to place.\n\nIn the early days, in 1849, as allowed by the then governor Sir S. G. Bonham, the collection was housed in a room at the Supreme Court building where the Society had its meetings. In 1859, when the Society ran into difficulties, the, by now, valuable collection of 400 books was placed in trust with the Morrison Education Society (formed in Canton in 1835) which, from 1855, had also kept its library in the Supreme Court house. In November 1869, when the Duke of Edinburgh visited the Colony to open the first City Hall, the Morrison Education Society presented its own library as well as that of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society to the first City Hall Public Library to serve as the reference collection. This laid the corner stone for the future relationship of the Society with the Hong Kong Public Libraries which eventually would become the permanent home for the Society's collection. In fact, following the resuscitation of the Hong Kong Branch in 1959, the President's first annual report stressed the need for ‘a meeting place of our own where we can build our Oriental library which should fill a special need'3 and expressed the hope that some accommodation could be made available in the City Hall. However, this was not realized until after several movements of both the Society and the collection.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278", "rank": 0 } ]